Why Most Self Defense Advice Doesn't Work... and What Actually Does
In this episode, we’re covering a topic we’ve never tackled before: self-defense. Our guest, Meg Stone, author of The Cost of Fear, explains why most self-defense advice is outdated, fear-based, and often ineffective—plus what actually works. We discuss how to recognize coercion, set verbal boundaries, and use simple but powerful physical techniques to protect yourself. Meg also shares how learning self-defense can boost confidence in all areas of life. If you’ve ever wondered how to truly stay safe, this episode is a must-listen!
Check out Meg’s book: The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence
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Juna: Welcome to a very different episode for us guys, for two reasons. First of all, Eddie and I are not in the studio together, tragically.
Eddie: Yuna, we've been at this for six years and this is the first time that we're separated.
Juna: I know! I know you guys, I got really sick.
Eddie: I miss you.
Juna: Oh my god, I miss you too, Eddie.
Eddie: But we persevere. Yes, the show must go on. And I think the second reason why this show is a little different is that we're going a little bit far afield from food and what we generally think of as self care into the world of actually taking care of your health by learning how to defend yourself, particularly for women.
Juna: Yes, so I met someone named Meg in my jiu jitsu class who was writing a book all about female self defense and I just thought it would be such a cool topic to talk about first of all because a lot of our listeners are women, over half. And second of all, because there's a lot of misinformation about self defense, and like you said, Eddie, we can't take care of our bodies if we can't defend our bodies if we get attacked.
Eddie: And one of the things that struck me from the conversation with Meg that you're about to hear is that it's not just about knowing where to strike with which part of your body. Um, hint, you know, an elbow to the throat or a knee to the groin are highly effective, but also the, the skills. To understand when you're being coerced and to avoid that and then the skills to verbally stop the assault.
Juna: Yes. So on today's episode, we're talking all things self defense, why most self defense advice is sexist, what are the most effective things to do when you are in a situation where you need to defend yourself, and how being more confident in your self defense skills will also impact your confidence outside of self defense situations.
I'm Yuna Yata.
Eddie: And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna: And you're listening to Food, We Need to Talk, the only health podcast that has done an episode on self defense, I think.
Eddie: Tell us if that's true.
Juna: First, we want to take a moment to shout out one of our favorite reviews. You guys have been blowing up our reviews lately. Like I don't know what happened. There was a dry spell and then we got a ton and it was so awesome. We are only. Nine away from two thousand. If you're listening to this and you're like, Oh, I keep meaning to leave one, please.
We're only nine away. That's Eddie's and I's biggest goal for the new year.
Eddie: So starting the new year, we have a beautiful review called My Eating Disorder. Journey by Polly Nita. I started listening to this podcast in 2021 when I was trying to kick my bulimia after it got scarily, chronically bad during the pandemic.
After eight years of my eating disorder, this podcast, along with medication and treatment was a huge step in becoming a more educated and self loving individual capable of healing. It's been almost three years. Since I've had diagnosable eating disorder behaviors and continue to listen to the podcast for Yuna and Eddie's entertaining scientific and loving banter and content.
Thank you both. Oh, you know, that's lovely. Thank you. Polynita. So
Juna: sweet. Thank you. We love that. And also this month is the month of eating disorder awareness week. So I thought it was especially fitting because it is coming up at the end of February. Remember guys, leaving us a review is one of the best ways to help other people find the podcast.
And it also makes Eddie and I feel really good.
Eddie: And one more thing, if you ever find yourself listening to the podcast and thinking, Oh my God, I wish I had written all this down. I'm learning so much, but there's so much to take in. And I'm trying to listen to this at 2. 0 speed. Anyway, slow down. Listen to us at normal speed.
We talk really fast normally. We've got great news for you. We have launched a newsletter. Every time we release a new episode, we'll send you a breakdown with links to the studies that we've mentioned, practical tips on how to apply what you've learned. There is no spam. It's free and hopefully fun. You can go to foodweneedtotalk.
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Juna: And now to the episode. Welcome to today's episode. Today we are talking to Meg Stone, author of the upcoming book, The Cost of Fear, Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist, and How We Can Stop Gender Based Violence. Meg, I would just love for you to start off by first telling us a little bit about yourself, how you got interested in this topic, how you got interested in writing this book, and just what got you into this line of work.
Meg: Sure. I have been doing work to address sexual assault and domestic violence for more than 30 years. And it all started when I was a sophomore in college, and I was in a class, and one of the staff of the local domestic violence organizations came and spoke, and I had one of those very amazing out of body experiences, where I just looked at her and I said, this is what I am going to do with my life.
And I had not declared a major yet. I changed my major. I did one internship followed by five more internships. And I just really, initially I thought that what I would do is become a lawyer because I wanted to stop abuse and violence and I wanted to change the world. And I was very lucky that I went to work for a lawyer.
When I was younger, and she really took my expectations about what the law could do and made them realistic and you
Eddie: decided not to become a lawyer
Meg: with all like the people who do legal advocacy work are so essential. And the work is so important, especially nowadays, but what I realized. After working nights in shelters, after going to court with survivors who were seeking restraining orders, was that there was something else that was Exciting me and inspiring me and that's something else really was learning that each of us has within ourselves the skills and the tools to do something to create the change, to resist or prevent violence, to interrupt violence.
So often when People experience sexual abuse, intimate abuse, other types of gender based violence. We are alone. And we are alone with somebody that we have been taught is trustworthy. Either because we are dating them, or they're a friend, or because they are a popular, you know, coach. Family member so as much as we need to change the world and change social norms We need a strategy that is as intimate as this violence itself
Eddie: So I love the idea that you're getting across that yes, there's a systemic ill but the actual intervention is It's in the moment.
Right. It's, it's, it's the front line. It's, you're down to the two of you. Right.
Meg: And it's, it's, you know, there's no public health issue that's going to be solved by one thing. But when it comes to types of abuse, violence, and harm that are usually outside of the public eye. The prevention strategy has to match the harm.
So, I had, you know, like most women, I had been told to clutch my keys, I had been told to stay in my dorm room, I had been told any number of places I shouldn't go alone, and I remember going to a self defense class that was led by two incredibly sincere and well meaning people, but The whole class was focused on how not to be dumb, and what smart women do, and what dumb women do.
And I remember this very complicated feeling. Every time we got to hit something, or strike something, Or yell, I felt this incredible power that I did not know I had and I felt this strength and this joy But then it was like blowing up the balloon and then popping it because every time I felt great about myself suddenly I was dumb because I studied at the library till after dark and you know, it's Winter, dark is 5 p.
m. And there was this understanding of all of the things that women did wrong to make ourselves victims. And There was an authoritative tone and a sort of certainty that the men who taught women how to be safe presented. And when I was younger, it just kind of shut down my critical thinking. I was like, okay, you know, they know things I don't.
And meanwhile, you know, as I said before, I was on my 400th internship. In the domestic violence crisis center, I had any number of friends who had been sexually assaulted by people they knew. I didn't know anyone who was, you know, dragged into a white van by a stranger in a dark parking lot. And I realized that what What they were teaching me was not to think or reason or evaluate or challenge somebody who is trying to coerce or intimidate me.
What they were teaching me was to follow and
Eddie: Follow what? Follow,
Meg: comply, do what they said. I should Clutch my keys.
Eddie: Clutching your keys meaning what? To strike Yes, to hit
Meg: some person who's gonna come. I should Never go outside alone. While I was researching this book, I reached out to several law enforcement agencies to ask them about the safety advice that they gave their community.
Um, there was a sheriff's department in Florida that was telling women not to go shopping alone and not to be in the parking lots of malls alone. So I reached out and I was like, Does your county have a disproportionate amount of crime in malls? Are malls a problem for people in your community? And the answer I got back was, Nope, this is just general information.
This is not a reflection of crime data. And I realized that a lot of the safety advice that, you know, every woman I've ever met has gotten at some point was not. Grounded in evidence,
Music: and
Meg: there's two ways that it wasn't grounded in evidence. One was that there was no evidence that the particular behavior would make us safer, and there was no evidence.
That the particular type of violence they were warning us about had any kind of prevalence.
Eddie: Where does that come from then? Were they well meaning in trying to sort of warn you? Yeah,
Meg: I think, I think there is a sincerity about wanting to keep people that they view as vulnerable safer.
Music: Mm hmm.
Meg: And there is a, a sincerity about trying to help people.
But. There's a lot of sincerity and there's a lot of evidence and the key is to connect them. The most compelling and the most robust personal safety evidence, and I say the most because they're, you know, I have a chapter called the evidence and it's discontent because there is so little evidence. The most robust evidence is for self defense programs that make explicit connections between individual skill building, and societal problems.
So, gender inequity in the world shows up as coercive control in your intimate relationships. So how do you learn the skills to recognize and resist coercive control? How do you learn the skills to set boundaries with somebody who is guilt tripping you? With someone who is telling you You're wrong.
You're a bad person. Uh, one of the teenagers that I interviewed for this book was in a situation where she was on a third date with a guy, and he had started yelling at her, he had started threatening her, and he told her that if she didn't text him back right away, you know, he was gonna do horrible things to himself or her.
And she learned what she learned from a self defense class. So she saw that. As coercive control and she broke up with him and some of her friends some people that she liked told her that she was rude for breaking up with him that she didn't give him enough of a chance and so not only did she recognize the coercive control from the role plays that she'd done in her self defense class.
And have the capacity to be able to say, you know what, this is not what I want for myself.
Eddie: So in the self defense classes, it sounds like it's starting with just understanding that the words can be coercive.
Meg: Yes.
Eddie: And it also sounds like it's a through line from people that choose to yell at you on the third date that no good is going to come of this.
Right. Is that accurate? Yes.
Meg: Yes. And just to be clear, Anybody who harms another person is responsible for that action, however we do or do not respond to it. But the most effective self defense courses include physical skills, you know, the thing that you picture in a magazine when you look at the kicking and the punching, but they also include instructors who are trained to Engage in coercive behavior.
Try to charm you into doing what they want. Try to manipulate you. Yell at you so that you freeze and you're overwhelmed and you do what they say. Because that sort of coercion or charm and intimidation are the tactics of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and some other types of violence or harm.
And it, you know, the way that firefighters Go to a fire simulator and put out a fire so that in the moment they just pick up the hose and do their thing.
Eddie: Yeah,
Meg: what we do is we simulate coercive, threatening, harassing, intimidating situations. Instructors actually embody those people. And our students practice yelling stop and no or getting themselves out of the situation or saying leave me alone.
And what that particular young woman and, you know, several other folks I've interviewed were saying is that when they were in the situation in their lives, that coercive behavior or that threatening behavior Sounded familiar to them.
Eddie: So they felt prepared.
Meg: They felt prepared, exactly.
Eddie: And, Yuna, I think, in preparing for the show, we were talking about how you could feel overwhelmed and sort of like freeze.
Right.
Juna: Yeah, I was gonna say, Meg, for me at least, I feel like, I, when I first started getting on dating apps and stuff, I feel like there were so many situations that I was in where I was so uncomfortable, and I wonder if like, a lot of women also feel this way, but I feel like I was always afraid of being rude or being mean or something, and so I would never actually voice How I actually felt first of all, and then second of all, me and Meg met in a jujitsu class.
Um, shout out to Redline. Redline is awesome. I love Redline. I love it too. But something that Redline has really, really highlighted for me is that even if you're like really strong, a man of the same size or larger, or sometimes even smaller than you is going to be able to overpower you, right? Even if they're like untrained
Music: and
Juna: I guess like that was also a really scary realization is that like, even if I like, I'm really strong and I spent a lot of time training and like, I have really good technique.
A lot of men are going to be able to physically overpower you. And so how do you reconcile both those things? Like, first of all, not wanting to like upset somebody or whatever. And then second of all,
Meg: So, I'll start with the second question and go to the first. Like you, I find Jiu Jitsu to be an incredibly humbling experience, and the reason why I We both have that experience is because we are playing a sport that has legal rules that are designed to ensure that nobody who plays that sport is seriously injured.
Now, I, you know, I lose 10 times for every time I win. You know, you know, Una's beaten me since she started. Um, but. That's why in most empowerment self defense classes, the physical skills are designed to level the playing field. I cannot, you know, use a legal sport fighting technique against a six foot So, when we teach skills, we focus on striking vulnerable parts of the body of the person who's trying to hurt us with strong parts of our own bodies.
So I I'm not going to get into a wrestling match and try and score four points in the middle of an assault. I am going to strike the eyes, I'm going to strike the groin, I'm going to strike the head. I'm going to use a simple movement with my own body, so not, you know, those fancy sweeps that I've been trying to get for four years and will never learn, but something that involves a kick, a strike, an elbow.
And I'm going to Use it against a part of the body. Like let's think about the eyes. You cannot function with a speck of dust in your eye. Your goal is only, if you are using physical self defense, your goal is only to cause enough pain to end the threat against you.
Music: Mm hmm.
Meg: Or, to cause enough unwanted attention to the situation that the person who is trying to harm you gives up.
So, for example, yelling, stop, or leave me alone, or you're hurting me, or don't touch me, really loud.
Eddie: Mm hmm.
Meg: Could be
Eddie: Enough to get unwanted attention there.
Meg: And interestingly, my colleagues and collaborators, the sociologist Jocelyn Hollander, the psychologist Charlene Sen, and 10 million other people, have actually done sort of evaluation studies where they've followed women who got feminist or empowerment self defense and women who did not.
And they were expecting to see more women in the self defense group kind of fight off the attacker. And what they saw instead was more people just not be in Any type of attempted harm situation
Eddie: because they were smarter.
Meg: I mean, I would never Or they were
Eddie: they were acting smart or or was it that
Meg: because they had Good information about what was actually a threat as opposed to All of us who live in the world who have bad information about what's a threat.
You know, uh, uh, you know, like a dark parking lot. My biggest threat in a dark parking lot is I'm going to slip on the ice and not be able to show up with Yuna in Jiu Jitsu next week because I'm injured. I want to just say this quickly and be very respectful. Just because something is uncommon doesn't mean it never happens.
And if it happened to you, your experience is every bit as important as more common types of assault. But what the empowerment self defense researchers did, especially because they, you know, they didn't, they wouldn't have been satisfied if, for example, oh, women who took self defense didn't get assaulted because they just hid in their rooms, you know, and never went anywhere and didn't do anything that would make their life good.
But. A researcher, a psychologist named Sarah Cran, did a qualitative study of like several hundred women who had taken the self defense class that was the subject of Charlene's research, and what they were finding was that the women were recognizing coercive control as a problem sooner. And Yuna What you said about dating apps is unbelievably common.
It was to the point where during the height of COVID lockdown, and as people were moving out of lockdown, Impact was actually doing virtual classes for women who date men on safe and sane online dating. And exactly that experience of being afraid of being rude and the ways in which we are all taught that.
Assertiveness is rude is part of that concern. Um, I will give credit to the Impact Positive Training Manager, Shay Orant, who developed and leads the online dating classes. She has really sort of I've developed a practice with her own online dating in which she communicates a boundary. You know, if she's chatting with someone online, if she's, you know, getting to know somebody, seeing if she likes them, seeing what they have in common, she will just communicate a boundary.
You know, she will say, You know, it can be it's not like a pretend boundary. It's a real boundary, but it's something to the effect of let's meet at the restaurant or, you know, let's chat on the app for a while. First. I don't want to talk on the phone yet. Whatever it is. And from that action. She gets information about this person.
The way, Yuna, that you're talking about sort of not wanting to act in ways that make the other person feel good, what she's saying is also pay attention to whether the other person is acting in ways that Make you feel good. You know, are they like, okay, cool. Let's chat on the app Are they invested in you being comfortable with whatever's happening because that's really a way to Think about is this somebody that I want to get to know am I feeling safe or comfortable with this person?
am I feeling like my limits matter and am I feeling like my limits are you know, not treated like a problem.
Eddie: I think this is a great moment for us to take a quick break. If you know someone that might benefit from what we're talking about today, please share this episode with them. We'll be right back.
And we're back with Meg Stone, author of The Cost of Fear. So these sound like some wonderful life skills. I mean, beyond, um, is there evidence even anecdotally of folks learning how to set boundaries, learning? That being assertive supports your own autonomy?
Meg: Yes. And
Eddie: that you probably do want to hang out with folks that
Meg: Right.
Eddie: that support that. So I'm, I mean beyond sort of the violence that we're talking about if you go down the wrong road, is there evidence of like People saying my, my work productivity and life and happiness improved with these skills.
Meg: I don't know about work productivity, that would be, uh, you know, that, that'd be a totally different area of research that, that someone has an expertise in, but not me.
Um, but what they do find with empowerment self defense or feminist self defense is increases in self efficacy and in some studies at pre test there's a disparity in self efficacy between women with past histories of sexual violence and those without and then at post test there is no disparity.
Eddie: So they've been able to correct to some degree.
Meg: Right. And there's other studies, particularly, a lot of the research, not surprisingly, is done on college campus programs, because they have, you know, ready made researchers right there. And some of the Really interesting work that's been done on PREPARE, which is our sister impact organization in New York.
There's a self defense class that is part of a group therapy process for survivors on a college campus. And what they've found is not only reductions in trauma symptoms, but also folks dating more. Folks going out to more parties. Folks feeling less apprehensive about just Having a good life. You know, sometimes we do a lot of workplace classes.
We do a lot of classes for women in male dominated fields or women's resource groups at workplaces. And one of the scenarios we present is a person comes up to me and they're trying to start a conversation with me. And I just, you know, very respectfully say, I don't feel like talking. And the point that I make is either I avoided a boring conversation or I avoided a coercive person.
And either way I win. So a lot of us have gotten a lot of training to please people, to be nice. Is that,
Eddie: is that also gender based?
Meg: I would say so. Um, you know, there's people who know that, that area much better than me, but every time we ask women in our, or teen girls in our classes, what advice have you gotten about what you can do to be safer.
The brainstorm comes quick. It's, you know, I could take the list from 10 years ago and put it next to the list from last week. It would be the same. I have done that exercise with boys twice. In a group that was predominantly white and predominantly middle class, I got answers like, wear a seat belt and look both ways before you cross the street.
In a group that was more racially mixed, I got, have your hands visible when the police come. Or, you know, don't wear a hijab in certain places. So, I think there are ways in which our safety options and our safety risks are not just about our gender, but they're about our race, our class, our disability.
Our line of work, you know, hospitality workers and ER workers have different safety concerns than me who sits in an office with a door closed and a security guard downstairs.
Eddie: Does the learning of the actual physical skills. So I think we're separating, or at least in my mind, we're separating. Kind of the, the intellectual and the verbal skills of recognizing this is a coercive person.
Right. They're not honoring my boundaries, I feel unsafe, I'm not going to engage. But then there's also, and if it gets down and dirty, you know where to hit them and how to hit them. Is there evidence of sort of the confidence improving, you know, do people go on more dates because they feel like.
Meg: There's not been research that.
Separates the physical from the verbal most of my collaborators would not teach only one or the other what we found we used to teach the verbal skills first and somebody had a brainstorm 15 years ago and switched the order and After getting some visceral physical embodied experience of strength and power and not just strength like, you know, from power lifting, but like somebody could grab you and you can get out of it.
You can fight back and our instructors are trained, you know, they're padded so that when you hit them in the eye, their real eye doesn't tear, but they are trained to not relent if you're not doing what you would need to do in a self defense situation so that you learn by doing. And what we found is that when people had that embodied experience of resistance, The verbal skills were stronger, the verbal skills were, you know, people were less tentative.
People were saying, Hey, stop. Hey, I said, I don't want to talk to you. Leave me alone. Stop. You're coming. I said, I don't want to talk to you. You're coming closer to me. Leave me alone. And what I did there in that verbal. Skill is I simply told the person what I wanted and what they were doing I'm not saying you are an abuser and you are Problematic, you know or like you weren't labeling them.
You're ugly, you know, like The word self is in self defense for a reason. So if I say to you like my favorite color is purple There's you know argument, right? But if I say purple is the best color and if you don't think so You're wrong, you know, so my goal, again, is to end the threat against me and to advocate for myself or others.
So stop, leave me alone. Like, again, leave me alone is very firm, but both from a practical standpoint, it's harder to like, Get in a fight based on leave me alone. But also if you are a person who might face scrutiny from the criminal legal system for protecting yourself, stop, leave me alone. I'm taking a step back.
Don't come any closer to me. Makes it very, you know, somebody has to try a lot harder. To label you as the aggressor. You
Eddie: were not going after them.
Meg: I just thought of this thing that I forgot to say. It's kind of a silly story about Yuna's jiu jitsu question, so I hope you don't mind. Please, please. We love silly stories.
So, before Redline, I was training elsewhere, and I, I, I wholly promised that this was an accident. So I'm, I'm gonna preface that. So I was training with this guy who was, you know, ten years younger than me, probably six foot five, very muscular, and he was winning. I was doing everything I can to, like, lose a little bit less badly, and I went for a knee cut for the jiu jitsu people listening at the very moment that he shifted, and because of that, I landed on his groin totally accidentally, and this person who was besting me at jiu jitsu Was done.
Like, he, he just had to sit out, a couple of guys were teasing me about how I hate men, and that, you know, whatever, it blew over, but an accidental groin, you know, not, it wasn't even a strike, it was a fall.
Eddie: Uh huh. But you realized your power.
Meg: But I was like, oh, that's why we teach how we teach, because if I had tried to armbar this guy, There is no universe in which I would have succeeded, but yeah, I did a bad knee cut and fell on his groin and he was, he was in the next round, but there was two and a half minutes left to the round and he was out for the rest of it.
And, you know, again, like women who train in fight sports, please respect the consent of the sport and don't just injure, injure your male training partners. That is not what I was saying, but it is really important. And also not very common in this culture, you know, like I started just when I'm on a plane or a train or a bus or something and someone asked me what I do, I'm like, I run a non profit and then they don't want to talk to me because if I say self defense, suddenly I'm being quizzed about martial arts or guns and there would not be you.
Feminist or empowerment self defense without martial arts. Martial arts is a key to what we do, how we do it, and the very visionary women who said We need to teach this differently if it's going to work to address sexual violence.
Juna: So Meg, my question to you is, what are the top three like verbal things you teach and the top three physical things?
So I know we talked about like going for the groin and the eyes. Is there anything else we should know about like if somebody grabs you, like how do you get them off? And like what are the verbal things you teach?
Meg: So physical things, two questions. What's free on me? What's vulnerable on the person who's trying to hurt me?
Um, there is no magical technique. Really, the technique is how can you cause enough pain to end the threat against you. So if someone grabs your ponytail, the rest of your body is free and they just put their face in range for an elbow strike. So it's just use a strong part of your body against a weak part of their body.
When it comes to verbal skills, simple Short, direct phrases like stop and leave me alone. Also telling the person what they're doing or what you want. You're getting too close to me. I want you to stop getting close to me. I'm going to take a step back or I'm going to leave. I don't want you to follow me.
So you're naming the behavior and when the person says you're uptight, you're rude, you're, you know, not letting a person who. is a threat to you, label you. And also, this is a verbal skill, but it's more of a discernment skill, understanding the difference between somebody behaving in a threatening way and somebody who faces stigma or is otherwise reviled.
So I've had folks come into our class and say, there's more homeless people on my street now, and I'm scared. And You know, without going into a long treatise about why homelessness happens, a person who's not going through a good time in their life, and who's sitting on your street and ignoring you Not a threat to you.
A well dressed, well resourced person you work with who gets in the elevators, puts their arm around you, and when you move away, calls you uptight. A threat to you. Or a concern. So, thinking about behaviors that touch you when you don't choose to be touched, that Try to separate you from your wants your needs and your best interests and try to label you as something negative For advocating for yourself.
Eddie: That's such
Juna: a good
Eddie: point. So Meg as the guy in the room. I just want to ask What would you train boys? Adolescent boys or men to do
Meg: there's a lot. I mean, there's my other training manager impacts other training manager Ben come oh does some great work with boys And our other staff as well for men and boys the types of violence that men and boys face It's very widely based on their race, their class, and whether they have a disability.
And in Massachusetts, men with disabilities have higher rates of sexual violence than women without disabilities. Women with disabilities have the highest rates, but Many of the sexual violence skills that we teach to women of all abilities, we also teach to teen boys with disabilities. For boys that are white, that are non disabled, that are middle class, that are college bound, a lot of the Safety issues that come up are sort of taunting and escalating and people being kind of baited into fights and baited into violence as a way to establish that you are enough of a man.
So if somebody is trying to get you in a fight, how do you de escalate it? Or if you are in a social group in college, if you are a young adult, In your friend group and one of your friends is trying to go upstairs with someone who's passed out. How do you intervene?
Music: You
Meg: know, there's a lot of Intervention skills that come from many different disciplines But like how do you say something and do something and keep yourself safe and frankly anybody could be assaulted Anybody could be targeted.
So basic skills and basic awareness is good for everyone.
Juna: And then is there training that men can go through to not be purveyors of sexual and gender based violence? Because sometimes I honestly wonder because it happens like so often by people or from people. That I would consider, like, highly educated and intelligent and, like, self aware.
Like, close friends I have, men, I feel like have crossed the boundary with people and they've told me that and they don't realize it in the moment and they only realize when the woman tells them afterwards. And I'm like, I know this person, I'm friends with this person. Like, how could they be doing this too?
Right, right. Do you know what I mean?
Meg: I mean, I think there's a lot of Great resources out there for men who seek them out. There's men's groups. There's, you know, men of strength clubs for high school students. There's many other groups out there, but the painful reality is that the prevention education programs that are Getting funding and getting attention from researchers, by and large, do not reduce perpetration.
But I don't want to leave it there, because part of the problem is that we have invested Resources, funding, you know, like I remember one of your episodes a couple months ago, the guest was talking about the research that goes into where to put the gum in the grocery store so that you'll buy it. Um, yeah.
But, you know. Yep, we covered
Eddie: that.
Meg: Yes, I, I remember, I, that was like, but when it comes to, even compared to other public health issues, sexual violence, and other types of violence is very under researched. So even like a discussion group or a, you know, multi session education program, the biggest outcome is people change their answers on the rape myths, but even like self reported perpetration doesn't change.
But what I will say about that is the majority of men So, the majority of people who do sexually assault are men, but the majority of men do not sexually assault. And I think if we cared enough, we could learn the difference between the men who don't sexually assault and the ones who do. Like, this is a health and wellness show, so I'll bring this in.
There is a study in our area called the Framingham Heart Study, in which they've spent over 75 years looking at Thousands of people following them through their lives to determine what causes heart disease and what, you know, who gets heart disease and who doesn't. And if they could do the same with men and boys from the time they're born to the time they're 30, we would know You know, what people who do not sexually assault have in common and what people who do have in common.
There are some kind of risk factors or protective factors that we know about, but the heartbreaking reality is that, you know, six hours of education does not change a lifetime of socialization or training.
Eddie: As we start to wrap this up. What would you recommend to someone listening to this that wants to become empowered through self defense training through the skills that you described, but they're actually feeling intimidated about doing that.
So what's the first steps and where do they turn to?
Meg: So the first step is to remember that. Being intimidated is fine, and every skilled empowerment self defense teacher I know will be completely compassionate and respectful if you're intimidated. When I saw my first demonstration of impact 20 years ago, I was so overwhelmed that I ran out of the room and the building.
So I think what I would say to your listeners is if you're nervous or if you're fearful or if you think you have arthritis or you're weak or you're 90 pounds, like, more than half of the people in whatever class you go to will also feel that way, and the folks who teach will have the skills to support you, and one of the most important things that they can do is if you opt out of something, to recognize that as a form of self defense, to say, you know, you are speaking up for yourself, you are challenging an authority figure, and You are advocating for your body, for your wants and your needs.
And when my student, you know, especially when my teenage students do that, I give them a lot of acknowledgement because that skill is going to help them more than that, that kick that we just worked on.
Eddie: They're manifesting what you're trying to teach them straight away.
Juna: Thank you so much for coming on, Meg.
We have so much more to ask you about, including tasers, pepper spray, advice for runners, etc. But we're gonna go do that on our bonus episode of The Talk. But until then, can you just remind us of your book's title so everybody can go check it out?
Meg: The title is The Cost of Fear, Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist, and How We Can Stop Gender Based Violence.
It is from Beacon Press and it is out on February 25th.
Juna: Oh, amazing. Okay, great. Well, I'm so glad that we got to have you on And I can't wait to continue the conversation on the talk. Thank you
Thank you so much to meg for joining us on today's episode If you want to read more about meg and also find out where to get her upcoming book the cost of fear You can go to food. We need to talk. com or click on our show notes You can find us at food. We need to talk on instagram You can find me at the official Yuna on Instagram and Yuna Jada on YouTube and TikTok.
And you can find Eddie
Eddie: Respecting people's boundaries.
Juna: Perfect! Food We Need to Talk is produced by Rebecca Seidel and Morgan Flannery.
Eddie: We are distributed by PRX.
Juna: We were co created by Kerry Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips, and me.
Eddie: For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider.
To find out more Go to food. We need to talk.com. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.
